Prof. Krzysztof Meissner from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, together with Prof. Hermann Nicolai from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, conducts research on superheavy charged gravitinos. In an article published in “Physical Review Research”, in collaboration with researchers from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Warsaw, the scientists propose using new underground neutrino detectors for detecting charged gravitinos.

After 40 years of intensive accelerator research failing to discover any new matter particles, the N=8 supergravity matter content is not only consistent with our knowledge, but remains the only known theoretical explanation of the number of quarks and leptons in the Standard Model. Several years ago, Prof. Krzysztof Meissner from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw and Prof. Hermann Nicolai from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI) went beyond N=8 supergravity and modified the original proposal, obtaining correct electric charges of the Standard Model matter particles. The modification is very far reaching pointing to an infinite symmetry K(E10), little known mathematically and replacing the usual symmetries of the Standard Model.

The recently published paper in “Physical Review Research” by Prof. Meissner and Prof. Nicolai, with collaborators Prof. Michał Lesiuk and Adrianna Kruk from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Warsaw, presents a detailed analysis of the specific signatures that events caused by gravitinos could produce at JUNO and in future liquid argon detectors such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in the United States.

Interdisciplinary analysis

The paper describes not only the theoretical background, both on the physics and chemistry sides, but also very detailed simulation of the possible signatures as a function of the velocity and track of a gravitino traveling through the oil vessel.

It required very advanced knowledge of quantum chemistry and intensive CPU-time consuming calculations. The simulations had to take into account many possible backgrounds – decay of radioactive C14 present in the oil, dark count rate and efficiency of photomultipliers, absorption of photons in oil etc.

The simulations show that, with the appropriate software, passage of a gravitino through the detector will leave a unique signal impossible to be wrongly identified with a passage of any of the presently known particles.

The analysis sets new standards in terms of interdisciplinarity by combining two different areas of research: theoretical and experimental elementary particle physics on one hand and very advanced methods of modern quantum chemistry on the other.

The detection of the superheavy gravitinos would be a major step forward in the search for a unified theory of gravity and particles. Since gravitinos are predicted to have masses on the order of the Planck mass, their detection would be the first direct indication of physics near the Planck scale and could thus provide valuable experimental evidence for a unification of all forces of nature.

Prof. Krzysztof Meissner’s presentation on the research: